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Swine Flu: The Latest Figures

These are the latest Swine Flu figures, now hotwired to the Guardian’s. When they update, this’ll update automatically.

UPDATE: 6th AUG – this table keeps breaking because every time The Guardian updates it, they move the rows around! I will try to fix. UPDATE 29th Aug – OK I’ve fixed this now. UPDATE 19th July: The Guardian have now updated their spreadsheet to include infection rate & mortality rate. Hmmmmmmm. I’m not saying anything….

Click around and re-order the countries by confirmed cases, infection, and mortality rates to get different perspectives on the situation.

(Apols for the crudeness of the design. I haven’t quite worked out how to edit the look and feel)

I believe just using sheer number of cases is a limited way of looking at it. Raw, the figures seem alarming. Put them in context with other countries or other figures, however, and it seems less alarming.

Confirmed cases have to be taken as a proportion of each country’s population size, or else it’s just a meaningless number.

Similarly, death rates are far more revealing when shown as a proportion of those infected

If you order the table by mortality rate, a very different picture emerges of the most stricken nations.

Suddenly the poorer countries leap to the top the table. Why do Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have the highest death rates?